WordPress Foundations 2.7: Your Simple Step-by-Step Guide To WordPress
09. Nov, 2009 
3 Comments
WordPress Foundations 2.7 is your essential guide to WordPress. All you need to know to be online in minutes. A quick and easy guide to get you started right now. WordPress Foundations covers from A to Z (with no fluff or filler) everything you need to get started using WordPress today. I’ll show you the exact steps you need to know to get you going. You will not get lost. Learn how to use WordPress, and get your site up in minutes. This is a no-nonsense guide to …
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This book is a perfect example of the flood of bad books and terrible information that the self publishing craze has let loose upon Amazon.com.
Unfortunately, you’ve also got an author who is posting positive reviews to counteract the negative reviews others have posted. Check out his other book on Amazon and you’ll see what I mean. The positive posts are written in the exact same style and cadence as the book.
Buyer Beware – this book is poorly edited and really has very little useful information. Truly, most of the information in this book could be gleaned from a careful reading of Wordpress’ own website.
Shame on Jason Annas for trying to pass this book off as a legitimate help guide for WordPress.
He should go back to the Self Publishing drawing board.
Wordpress Foundations 2.7 should not be your first choice in Wordpress books. (Your first choice should be “Building a Wordpress Blog People Want to Read” by Scott McNulty Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read) After reading Wordpress Foundations 2.7, I felt compelled to warn purchasers that it fails on three fronts: Writing technicalities, clarity of information, and purpose.
Writing technicalities: This book is fraught with grammatical errors. The repeated use of “your” in sentences where “you’re” is appropriate speaks volumes to the lack of writing skill of the author. Commas abound where commas do not belong. Whereas I don’t expect every author to avoid ending sentences with prepositions (doing so can be clunky), the sentence structures in this book could have been easily rewritten for clarity by an enthusiastic high school student. Perhaps the author should have considered having someone read through his rough draft, rather than moving directly to publishing.
Clarity of information: This book steps you through all of the screens and options of the act of configuring Wordpress. Readers of the book would hope that the author would help them to understand more of what might be important in some of these configuration settings. All to often that is not the case. An on screen option that says something to the effect of “This option turns your screen green” (this text provided on the web page that you are currently looking at while following along with the book) has, in the book, the clarification by the author that “This option turns your screen green”. That does little to help the reader. Neither does saying “we’ll talk about that later” or “this isn’t important”. A reader needs to know _why_ and has spent their money to find out.
Purpose: I was mislead to think that the purpose of this hastily assembled book was to provide mastery of Wordpress. Or even to provide a solid introduction to Wordpress. It isn’t. The purpose of this book is to guide people to the author’s web site to purchase video guides on Wordpress. Clearly I spent money on a poorly written ad for a web site.
I only hope that people seeking a well written Wordpress book will avoid wasting their money on this so-called “webmastery”.
Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I run a small local business, and in that business I sell flowers, as well as other items. My main business is flowers. We cover Prom’s, Wedding’s, Holiday’s, and more.
I’m taking a small business class right now, and the teacher recommends having a blog, and he also recommends using wordpress (I currently have a regular webpage I paid about 500 dollars to get made and has 5 pages).
I know nothing about any of this technical stuff. So I went to amazon and typed in wordpress, and saw there was a dummies book on it and bought it right away.
When the book arrived, I was excited, I read it, and read it, and read it. I got some good ideas, but I was confused with where to start. I think that book is more for the technical crowd than any other kind of book. I kept getting confused, I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I also didn’t understand half of what was being said (but again I’m not a tech person, I’m a flower person).
After going through most of the book, I still did not have my blog online. I was going to pay someone to set up a blog for me and let me work on it from there when someone recommended this book to me.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get it. The huge dummies book was to much for me, but the price was pretty low so I grabbed it.
To my surprise, this book was exactly what I needed. The book is basically a step by step book. It starts out with coming up with a name, then signing up with wordpress, or installing it yourself, and walks you through the whole process. It also shows how to fight spam, and how to keep your blog up to date.
It covers adding pictures, movies, how to format the text and more.
I have never built a website before. The website I had I never updated (didn’t know how), this book explained it to me very plainly.
I’m very glad I got this book, if this book didn’t work I was going to just pay someone to do this for me, and have them update it once a week. I’m glad that is no longer a problem for me.
I also bought another book called ProBlogger. It teaches you how to make money with your blog, and I’m sure that will help me greatly in the future.
Once I get used to blogging and wordpress, I’m sure the other book can help me, but right now I just cannot use it, and this little book is a lifesaver.
My favorite part about this book was, it did not slow me down with stuff I didn’t need to know. This book will not make you a wordpress master, but it will help you get your blog up and online right away. (That’s what counts right?)
This version also covers the new version, the other books showed older versions of the platform which also made things confusing.
I’m just so glad I finally have this done, I can be online and design my own website. It’s so cool and empowering. I already got some posters printed out, and I cant wait to start showing off my new blog! I’m a blogger now! Yes!